Spring Camp 2019
On 18 and 19 March 2019 Warwick Q-Step Centre hosted its fourth annual Quantitative Methods Spring Camp on the theme of Social Media Analysis. The event was a great success and we saw our highest attendance rate yet in our Spring Camp series.
Both undergraduate and postgraduate students came together from across a number of different disciplines within the university to hear engaging, informative and inspiring talks from our guest speakers who shared their expertise on social media analysis in their respective fields. On Day 2 students also had the opportunity to engage in an interactive workshop collecting, analysing and visualising social media data using the R statistical language.
Broadened my understanding of the benefits of Social Media Analysis! The talks were excellent. It was really interesting to learn about what the speakers discovered in their research.
Spring Camp Participants 2019
This event was excellent. I learned a lot of new things, it was extremely useful.
Spring Camp Participants 2019
It sparked a new interest in data research!
Spring Camp Participant 2019
Spring Camp 2019 Programme
Federico Botta, Research Fellow in Data Science, Warwick Business School
Quantifying crowd size and mobility patterns using online data
Federico Botta is a Research Fellow in the Data Science Lab at Warwick Business School. His research aims to provide a deeper understanding of human behaviour, both at the collective and individual level, by using novel data streams. Large data sets are constantly being generated thanks to our interactions with large technological systems, such as the Internet and the mobile phone network, or they can be collected through our usage of smart phone apps and tracking sensors. Federico uses tools from data science, network theory, behavioural and computational social sciences to analyse these data sets and investigate different aspects of human behaviour.
Alexia Pretari, Global Advisor - Impact Evaluations, Oxfam GB
Social media for improved governance: an impact evaluation
Alexia Pretari is a Global Advisor on Impact Evaluations at Oxfam GB. She leads on the development of new tools and methods for assessing resilience capacities. She is currently working on the design and implementation of the impact evaluation of a project aimed at building active citizenship and leaders' responsiveness, through the use of social media by community activists. Alexia is passionate about finding ways for impact evaluations to better reflect how power, and its different dimensions and intersections, play out and affect communities, households and individuals.
Elliot Jones, Researcher, Demos
Is anyone listening? How social media analysis can inform the policy debate
Elliot Jones is a researcher at Demos’s Centre for the Analysis of Social Media (CASM). CASM has developed it’s own social media analytic tools built with social research in mind, and Elliot is currently using these to explore patterns of ethical and unethical gambling advertising and understanding perceptions and presentations of virtue online. He has contributed to ongoing CASM research into how Russia has used Twitter in its disinformation and influence operations in the UK and Europe. Elliot holds a BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from the University of Oxford.
Joshua Feldman, Data Scientist, BBC
Understanding our audiences: Social listening at the BBC
Joshua Feldman is a data scientist at the BBC, where he uses a host of machine learning techniques to answer business problems and help the organization better understand its audiences. He mainly codes in R and SQL, taking a specialist interest in computational text analysis and data visualization. He holds an MSc in quantitative research methodology from the London School of Economics.
Dr James Tripp, Academic Technologist at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, University of Warwick
Day 2 gives participants the opportunity to gain hands-on experience in the collection, analysis and visualisation of social media data using the R statistical language.
James Tripp trained as a Cognitive Scientist (BSc, PhD) at the University of Warwick. He teaches technical workshops, writes software (GitHub) and administers CIMs linux systems. His passions are open source software, data analysis and visualisation.